It Takes Two

It Takes Two cannot be played alone — it requires exactly two players, local or online, controlling a bickering couple magically transformed into dolls. That restriction sounds limiting on paper. In practice it's the source of everything the game does well.

Each chapter introduces an entirely new set of mechanics and then largely discards them by the next one. One section has you controlling gravity while your partner manipulates time; another turns you into a gun-and-wrench duo defusing traps together; a later stretch has one player as a sap-slinging tree creature and the other wielding a magnet. Few games are this generous with fresh ideas, and almost none sustain that pace for an entire runtime without the mechanics feeling thin or under-explored.

Crucially, nearly every puzzle and boss fight is asymmetric by design — you and your partner are doing genuinely different things that only work when combined, rather than the same task in parallel. That forces real communication, and it's where the game's cooperative identity is strongest: you can't brute-force a section solo, and success feels earned by both players, not one carrying the other.

The story, about a couple on the verge of divorce being forced to work through their problems via magical platforming, is broader and more sitcom-ish than the mechanical design deserves, and a talking self-help book character (Dr. Hakim) splits opinion — some find him charming comic relief, others find him grating. It's a minor complaint against a game that otherwise rarely puts a foot wrong mechanically.

Verdict: If you have a regular co-op partner, It Takes Two is close to essential — one of the few games built from the ground up around two people playing together, rather than one person playing alongside a second controller.